A Messy Marriage

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. It's good to have you here. It's good to have us together. We're in the season called Advent. The word Advent is a word that's, well, it's Latin in derivation, adventus, which goes back to the Greek, which totally looks different, but it's perousia, and that word means appearing, showing up. Showing up is half, if not probably 90% of everything. God shows up. God appears, and we celebrate both the first and second appearing, the fact that Christ came to this messy place, and he was born in a messy manger, and Christ will come again to renew the heavens and the earth and to bring all things together. And so during Advent, this four-week period before Christmas, we celebrate both of those things at once, kind of the in-between-ness of the first and second coming of Christ, celebrating the first and awaiting the second, anticipating the second. And it's good to be in this time, in the middle. Now typically, the focus during the Advent season when I grew up were passages from the prophet Isaiah, some of the most well-known ones, like, for unto us a child is born, and unto us a son is given, yada, yada, yada. I remember reciting those in Christmas play after Christmas play after Christmas play. Any of you do that, too? And almost all the time, we take them out of context, in the sense that that was said at a really difficult time for Israel, in the midst of a messy time with King Ahaz on the throne, not a great guy, and all these things going on, and yet Isaiah has hope of what God will do in the future. He will bring a much better king than any they had. But today in this series, we're picking out passages that at first probably never showed up during those Christmas pageants, especially this one in Hosea chapter 3. This is what we're going to read, and you'll go, like, how in the world does this fit in with Christmas? And the Lord said to me, go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisin. So I bought her for 15 shekels of silver and a homer and a lethic of barley. Pretty cheap wedding there, huh? And I said to her, you must dwell as mine for many days. You shall not play the whore or belong to another man, so will I also be to you. For the children of Israel shall dwell many days without a king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or household gods. Afterward, the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days. Wow, prophets are interesting people, aren't they? The more I get to know them, the less I'd want to be one, okay? I'll be honest. We'll show you why later on. But from this passage, we're going to be doing three things. First of all, how our relationship with God is like a marriage, but how our relationship with God is like a messy marriage. And then finally, how God mends the messy marriage and what it costs him to do it. So God's relationship with his people is like a marriage. So in Hosea 1, the first chapter, this is what it says. When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, so this is Hosea's call, how God calls him to be a prophet. He says, go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord. What? What a messy situation. But God is saying, look, this is what it's like for me to have connected to Israel. Now the name of his wife, you will find out later, is Gomer. The only Gomer I've ever known is Gomer Pyle. You don't even know who Gomer Pyle is, do you? You do, yes? You do. You've never heard of Gomer Pyle? Well, golly. He's part of Andy Griffith, sort of, and then a spin-off, right? Anyways, but Gomer is the name of a woman, just like Jezebel and Judas. This is one of those names never to be used, okay? But just as Hosea is to marry Gomer, who is a prostitute, yeah, this isn't necessarily a PG sermon, in a sense, at least those words are coming up. And well, anyways, so God says that's what it's like to be married or covenanted to Israel. Now this isn't the only passage that talks about the relationship between God and Israel like that of a marriage. In fact, it's very common in the prophets. You can find it in Jeremiah chapters 2 through 4, if you want to read that sometime. And in Ezekiel chapter 16, for instance, this is how Ezekiel puts it, I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord, and you became mine. So the whole idea is that God has chosen Israel as his bride. And according to the prophetic understanding of the Old Testament, from Isaiah to Jeremiah to Ezekiel to Hosea to almost any of them, they will tell you, you cannot understand your relationship to God sim...